‘You didn’t throw them away?’ asked MacGregor.
Mrs O’Malley indignantly drew herself up to her full height. ‘I should think I didn’t! I packed ’em away in a cardboard box and I’ve got it in my room. Do you want to see it?’
‘We may have to take it away,’ said MacGregor as he and Dover followed Mrs O’Malley downstairs into the basement where she had her own bed-sitting room.
The television was on and Mrs O’Malley, having deposited the cardboard box on the table, made no move to switch it off. ‘I’ll be glad to see the back of it,’ she announced as she settled herself down in her chair again to watch the second half of Crossroads. ‘I’ll want a receipt, of course.’
The cardboard box yielded precisely nothing. It merely confirmed the almost ephemeral nature of Pearl Wallace’s life. A few cheap, mass-produced garments, one or two items of inexpensive make-up, a couple of tawdry teenage magazines. No letters.
Mrs O’Malley, her eyes riveted to the screen, was as helpful as ever. ‘How should I know? I sort out my own letters and dump the rest on the table in the hall. I can’t remember whether she got any letters or not. No, now I tell a lie! She did get one, not long before she scarpered. One of those official ones in a long brown envelope. Typed. At least’ – Mrs O’Malley calmly proceeded to dash every hope in sight – ‘I think it was for her, but I could be mistaken.’
MacGregor asked if he might see the room which Pearl Wallace had occupied and Mrs O’Malley, making it very clear that this ranked as an Imposition, consented. ‘It’ll do you no good,’ she forecast as she took down her bunch of duplicate keys from a nail. ‘I gave that room a right good clean out when I re-let it. You’ll not find any of your clues there now.’
MacGregor opened the door for her. ‘Even so . . .’
Mrs O’Malley pushed past. ‘I’ll tell you one thing, though,’ she said as she started laboriously up the stairs. ‘You might let me have her key back sometime. Look, it’ll be a Yale one like this . . .’
Dover indulged himself in a little belch and then, taking Mrs O’Malley’s chair, settled down to see what cosy catastrophes Meg Mortimer was coping with this week.
And so another day of unremitting toil came to an end. All in all, MacGregor reckoned that they’d made some progress. They had found out the dead girl’s name, where she worked and where she lived. And all this had been achieved without Dover unearthing a single new murder suspect. He’d tried, of course, but it had been very half-hearted. Even he hadn’t quite been able to see any of the Barford-in-the-Meadow lot following Pearl Wallace all the way to Frenchy Botham and there killing her.
‘I didn’t go much on that landlady woman,’ said Dover as, sitting well back, he filled the entire police car with cigarette smoke. ‘You’d have thought she’d have wondered where the girl was, wouldn’t you?’
MacGregor was deep in speculation, trying to decide if Dover would notice if he wound down the window a crack. ‘I’m afraid the truth is that nobody cared two hoots about Pearl Wallace, sir. And it’s not only Mrs O’Malley and Ermengilda’s Kitchen. What about the girl’s family? Nobody’s been making enquiries about her from that direction, either. Poor Pearl Wallace seems to have been a complete nonentity, doesn’t she, sir?’
Dover stretched his legs out. ‘They always lumber me with these crummy old cases,’ he grumbled. ‘Anything that hits the headlines, they keep for themselves.’
MacGregor tried to look on the bright side. ‘Never mind, sir! I expect Pomeroy Chemicals can recognize a good professional job when they see it, whether it gets a lot of publicity or not.’
By now Dover had all but forgotten who the hell Pomeroy Chemicals were. ‘D’you know,’ he said, his eyes glazing over quite dreamily, ‘I’ve always wanted to investigate a murder that had got somebody from the Royal Family mixed up in it. Either way,’ he added generously. ‘Victim or killer.’Strewth, that’d get me in the history books, never mind the bloody newspapers! It’d get world coverage. I’d be able to write a book about it. Several books, probably. And then there’d be interviews and film rights and . . .’
MacGregor waited to see if Dover was going to finish the sentence, but he wasn’t. Even day-dreaming about work seemed to tire him out.
‘Oh, well, sir,’ said MacGregor, ‘there’s always tomorrow, isn’t there?’
‘Is there?’
‘And, speaking of tomorrow, sir’ – MacGregor thought he had made the transition really rather skilfully – ‘I was thinking that we ought to go and see the Headmaster of Mottrell Comprehensive School. You remember, sir, he’s the man who gave Pearl Wallace the reference that enabled her to get the job at Ermengilda’s Kitchen.’
‘What the hell do we want to see him for?’
‘We’ve got to see anybody who can give us any information about Pearl Wallace, sir.’
Dover tipped his bowler hat down over his eyes and a few specks of rudely disturbed dandruff floated down onto the shoulders of his overcoat. ‘’Strewth!’ he grunted disgustedly.
11
The Secretary of the Headmaster of Mottrell Comprehensive School was a woman of ample bosom and great calm. Christened ‘The Forlorn Hope’ by a member of the teaching staff who was more interested in military history than sex, she prided herself on taking everything in her stride. After nineteen gruelling years in the world of secondary education, the arrival of a couple of detectives from Scotland Yard didn’t raise so much as a flicker.
‘The Headmaster is expecting you,’ she acknowledged. ‘I’ll let him know you’ve arrived.’ She depressed the switch of the intercom on her desk. ‘It’s Miss Hope here, Headmaster!’
‘Carmen Miranda!’ crackled the intercom.
‘Vladivostok!’ responded Miss Hope placidly.
